I was halfway through printing McBig's server rack, but found some things I thought could be improved. As a result, I developed a complete rework of the project from scratch in Solidworks, while maintaining compatibility with the former project. This means you can retrofit your existing server rack!
Structural Upgrades
The original design uses the rack shelves themselves as a structural component. However, this means that removing a shelf or rack mounted component can cause the rack to collapse. This rework adds dedicated structural components, and changes the geometry of various parts to further reinforce the rack.
Usability upgrades
Traditional mounts
The improved stiffness of the structure allows you to mount components using only the front rail, like a traditional server rack!
Dense back mounts
Due to the new rail orientation, components can be mounted to the back of the server rack, allowing for very dense mounting.
Always stackable
Due to the new orientation standard, all server rack builds can be stacked on top of each other with no additional hardware.
Offset Hole Spacing
The hole spacing on many panels on this project has offset spacing may seem incorrect - but is a design feature that is backwards compatible with existing standard hardware.
Due to the way the original McBig rails are designed, you may end up in configurations where you may want to off set a part by ⅓ U:
Standard Mounting configuration - notice the gap.
The offset configuration lets you offset the panel in some edge use cases:
Offset Mounting configuration - gap filled.
This is understandably, a pretty niche case. "Standard" spacing variants are planned in the future.
